Can you use a little positive news? Well, your wish is my command. I have some really good economic news to share with you, but first I have to put it into context. So please read on.  

As many of you who follow us on Facebook know, last week Drs. Thackeray, Sea and Cathy and I were out of our offices attending a Target Training International conference. The theme of this year’s Winner’s Conference was, “Believe in Yourself and Rise Above the Rest.” Yours truly even had the honor of presenting a breakout session on successful business practices.

As a matter of introduction, Target Training International is the human behavior research and development company that has created a plethora of assessments that we use for your chiropractic coaching and staff hiring. We have been a “Value Added Associate” for over a decade now because this company is at the cutting edge of human development and they are driven by a higher purpose.

The people who attend this conference are business owners, they are coaches and many of them coach CEOs of major corporations internationally. Now when I say international, I mean TTI’s assessments are utilized by other thought leaders in over 50 countries and are written in 26 languages.  They are really pushing the message of human potential to a whole new level of scalability.  As they have taught us, if you know yourself then you can interact with others, then you can create with others and then you can make an impact on the world. 

It is kind of fun attending a conference that is non-chiropractic every once in awhile just to see if chiropractors are really that different? I wonder now and again if we are the only ones who have been turned off by platform salesmen, corporate greed or negatively affected by attendees who talk more than they act and whine more than they give.

So what do you think? Are we that much different as a profession? Do you think chiropractors are really that different from other business owners and professionals in the world?  If you answered no, you’re right. We really aren’t all that different because we are all human beings.

So here’s the good news I promised. TTI’s unofficial spokesperson let it slip that they are on track for a record breaking year! They started our session by reminiscing about how last year nobody wanted to talk about the year 2009, because it wasn’t a pretty year for businesses.  And then they talked about how 2011 is starting to show signs of real recovery in the business world. When I say business world, I don’t mean in one state, one province or one country. I am talking about the consciousness and the reinvestment that corporations and businesses are starting to do worldwide. They are using more assessments, which means they are investing in their people, and investing in new people, new jobs.

So in spite of what you might be hearing on the radio or on television or on Twitter or even if you are watching “Jersey Shores”, I want you to know that things are on the upturn.  I also want you to know that many of our clients are on the upturn and that there is a wave building within this DC Mentors community that is absolutely palpable and measurable.

The other good news is this. As a company we intend to positively impact how other business owners and professionals view our profession. And I am glad to say it is happening. Just in the last 2 months we have attended Michael E. Gerber’s “Dreaming Room” and now TTI’s conference. Those in attendance are seeing chiropractors in a whole new light.

It is really amazing. Every encounter we have with people out there in the business community is positive and they have incredible things to say about you. They always say something very positive about their chiropractor. Yet 8 out of 10 say, “But he/she needs some business help, I want to get the book ‘E-Myth Chiropractor’ for them.”  A very telling statement. And those who have never been to a chiropractor ask us for a referral doctor in our network. That is our job in this whole DC Mentor community, to continue to reach out to change this generation of chiropractors, starting first with YOU.

Things are coming around yet not everyone will see the difference. Some of you grew in 2009, 2010 and are on track for a banner year in 2011. I think it is safe to say that you can always do better. You will need to work on your business, not just in it. You will need to continue to make your good patient communication skills great. And you will need to invest time and money into a chiropractic coaching and training program. Success never happens in a vacuum. We want to be your company.

There is a little bit of anxiety in growth.  Have you read the book, “Finding Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi?   He is the guy that coined the word “Flow”.  Flow isn’t, “I’m smoking dope and I’m in flow.” 

Flow is what you feel as an athlete. We talked about this at length at the Chiropractic entrepreneur seminar, Brain Spa, last September.  I was addressing this performance anxiety and what it takes to be a world class chiropractor.  You must  be able to push yourself beyond your present level of competency.  If you don’t have your business competent yet, you have anxiety, but you must push past that point.  It’s not comfortable because comfort will create atrophy. 

There is an edginess to this, your day to day adjusting and your day to day business  do have to have a tad of anxiety or else your chiropractic business won’t grow.  You have to push yourself in order to develop that next level.  It’s the psychology and neuroscience of optimal performance.  So what I would have you do every once in awhile is to cluster book your patients in one hour where you are not comfortable and you push your skill sets and your systems to see how you do.  Does that anxiety idea make a little bit of sense to you? 

What I want to eliminate is the insanity of worry?  That is what I want to eliminate, worry.  But I’m going to push you to be anxious.  Because if you aren’t anxious there won’t be any urgency and there won’t be any growth.  You will slip on the other side of the wave and it will turn into comfort and then boredom and then burn out.  A couple of you on this webinar were burned out when I met you and you are now scraping the carbon off of your toast.

Let me share with you a distinction between a dream and a fantasy. 

A doctor gets on the phone with me and says, “I am 57 years old. My practice has never really produced a lot but I know that if I can get 6 months or 7 months training with DC Mentors and that is all I will need because I have been in practice a long time and I know that I will be hitting some peak numbers and that is all it will take”.  That is a fantasy, that is why chiropractic management companies sell fantasies. “If you get on Facebook your practice will explode,” is fantasy.  They are fantasies. 

The dream says what I am going to do is transform people’s lives.  I see this human condition called kids that need chiropractic care.  Or kids who are 80 years old who still need chiropractic care because they just have this little kid inside that never really got taken care of, you know physically and emotionally.  A dream has got to be sustainable, it’s got to be scalable meaning it has to be able to grow or it won’t be blessed.  If it can’t be scaled it won’t be blessed.  Scalable means size, reproducible. Scale would be I see a 100 chiropractic patients a month, can that 100 a month turn into a 100 patients a day?   

The startup energy, enthusiasm and the passion around the dream has to get fun at some point.  Even if it’s not where you want it to be, anticipating the relief of not worrying about your business when you wake up at 3:00 in the morning. . . man, that will drive the urgency.  

If there is no sense of urgency, it’s a fantasy.  All you’re doing is going through the motions.  Just like a patient says, “I want to get well this year but I am only going to be able to come once a week.  They are living a fantasy because there is no sense of urgency and there is no action being taken.  So that is fantasy.

Looking at this pyramid, let’s look at the pinnacle.  We did a little bit of this in the chiropractic seminar, Brain Spa, but the pinnacle is affluence.  That means you have no debt, you have bonds that are giving you money without having to do anything for that, and that you are reinvesting that bond income.  Affluence would mean you are having a life where you are not having to push your chiropractic  practice to build it anymore, its momentum and its volume right now are funding your lifestyle as you want it to be funded and your future it solid.  That’s chiropractic affluence. 

Pre-affluence is in that area where your debt’s almost completely gone and you are still in the process of building your wave. 

Thriving means I have got a vision now.  I know that this business model and the vision of my chiropractic business is patient centered.  It is simple fee, non-threatening to patients, hassle free, patient centered, all of the processes.  Thriving means I am feeling that momentum. 

Middle class means I have either given up or I am just used to the struggle.  It’s the economy or it is where I live, it’s people and there is nothing I can do.  The fire is out.

Do you have a fire?

The next part of this puzzle is structural authority.  Structural authority is, “this is how we do things here and this is what you will be doing.”  If you can really embrace structural authority you can get on with being an incredible sapiential leader, a wise human being.  Do you have all the answers?  No.   You see, if you get the structural out of the way and you get your systems in charge, time flows a lot better and you are actually going to look forward to going into your chiropractic practice. 

I don’t know if you have been following DC Mentors’ forum but one of our clients, Dr. Perron, did a C.O.W. the week after Christmas.   It is the first time he did a C.O.W with the intention of actually seeing it as Chiropractic Opportunity Week and not strictly a new patient acquisition event.  I think, at last count, there were 35 new people that he attracted to his office.  That means 35 new patient exams plus 35 relating of findings.  How sharp would you be after seeing 30 new patients and 30 RYF’s?  Do you think your skill set would improve? 

We are talking about what can happen.  Are we saying a doctor needs to see 120 new patients a month?  Absolutely not.  You know, when you look at statistics, you’re going to have a flow of new people where the flood gates kind of open up and you don’t even know why.  You will be building momentum and all of the sudden the practice opens up and people start calling. 

Two doctors that have been chiropractic coaching clients with DC Mentors for several years said to me on the phone last week that they finally got, for the first time, what I’ve been saying about the holidays being the busiest time of the year in your practice.  They finally saw it.  They finally saw and in a 2 hour morning on Dec. 24, they both had 30-40 patient visits plus 3 new people because people were traveling and all that thing. 

That’s why you are training and attending chiropractic seminars and these webinars, so that when those opportunities happen, you’re entirely prepared.  There is a Chinese caricature, I think it’s the Chinese, that says luck is preparedness meeting opportunity. 

So train on this.  If you’re dragging your feet a little bit about changes or hiring a new chiropractic technician, training your chiropractic staff, training in the DC Mentors’ systems, you will quicken your demise or you will extend your misery to the point where you just don’t care anymore.

 Let’s get this structural thing in place, let’s get these procedures in place, let’s get this training in place.  First, come from the impersonal process in your mind, an impersonal goal which says, “There are so many people out there that need what I do, my promise is that I am going to do these things for them, and check these things to see if I can help them.”

 What is your promise?

There could be a sense of excitement in the changes you make and tasks that you do if you step back and look at WHY you are doing it. 

What would happen if you were doing a chiropractic new patient exam and then rolled into a relating your findings and the patient said, “You know, my husband’s out in the waiting room and his neck is killing him.  We are on our way to the massage therapist.  Is there anything he should do?” 

“Well, let’s have a look,”  you could say and know you have the capacity, not only in the systems of your office and it’s flow, but also the capacity inside you to be able to emotionally shift from one thing to next, to the next seamlessly.  Wherever you end up, whatever room you end up in, whatever table you end up at, it’s you with these two ideas called Sapiential Authority and Structural Authority. 

Here’s what happens when sapiential authority doesn’t show up with the new patient- We have all had the new patient that has been going to a chiropractor all their lives or the ones that haven’t been for six months and they know all they need is one adjustment.  Or the chiropractic patients  who say, “All I think I need is a little crack here,” or,  ”I think it is a muscle and it will be better.”  

Sapiential authority allows you to define what you have found, what you intend to do and how you intend to do that and for how long you intend to do that and what you are going to be looking for as a sign that things are changing, either one way, in the direction of well-being and restoration or the other, in the direction of getting worse.  

When you hold the confidence that means you have the competencies under you.  The clinical competencies can never be outsourced.  In other words, outsource a clinical competency by saying, “Look, your sEMG shows this . . .” or, “Your x-rays show this . . .”  In a sense that is outsourcing your competencies, meaning you’re relying on just that to bolster your opinion.  You should step back and use all of the pieces of your exam, your wonderful hands, remember your hands?   

You will know if you are hitting sapiential authority if you are not defending what you find.  Define, but stop defending.  This is where the sapiential authority comes in. 

Remember, your competencies do not just end with your clinical competencies.  There are other competencies like being able to read people, being able to ask questions and do a quick scan and read of them and out behaving the doctor who was there yesterday.  Out behave the doctor who was there in the 2010, because if you out behave that doctor you will continue to build that momentum and excitement and enthusiasm.  You are going to find that every new patient exam that you do will actually be an opening for the patient to have a WOW experience that they will talk about.  “I can’t believe I went to this doctor and she actually talked to me and listened to my answers.”

If I were to make a visitation to your Chiropractic practice, unannounced, what would happen?  If I walked into your office and there were two new patients, one was scheduled and one was scheduled but they put them in at the wrong time, so now you have two there at the same time.  What would I find?  What would happen? 

Apologetic chaos. 

Would there be organization?  As we are clicking together all the systems, we have got to have the systematic view, which is the pieces and the processes, and then we have to have the systemic view, which is that view of how the whole thing works together. 

It seems to be that our left brain gets so involved in each little process and each little system that sometimes we don’t get a chance to step back.  Step back today.

Things are going to happen in your office unexpectedly but there should be an ability to take that chaos and make it flow.  And it may be you feel just a little bit of internal stress because you know it could be working better, but it isn’t.  I want you to get use to what it is like to grow your practice when it really starts to take off. That is what is feels like on the inside. 

It is like I am sitting here at Lake Tahoe watching a couple of the ducks in the water moving along and it looks like nothing is happening but if I had an underwater camera I would see those little feet just beating and beating under the water.  So your little feet are beating.  The beauty of getting a practice to stop running on just your energy and your enthusiasm is that it can be sustained if there is just some glitch in the system.  The rest of the systems will kind of, by default, take over.

You can have different styles as a boss.  You can be rigorous.  Rigorous means you have high standards.  You would expect staff to come across the threshold of the practice without bringing in their personal dramas, whether they are under the weather a bit, whether they have a subluxation, whether they have a headache, neck pain or just had a fight with their spouse or child or they just had a challenge with an animal, maybe one of their pets is sick. Whatever it is, they are able to walk across the threshold of your practice without it.  They enter the office and take on that professional role as helping assist in patient care and all the things that occurred prior are left outside.  Now all this becomes about the patient.  That’s  a rigorous standard. 

And you can’t have a rigorous standard if you’re coming in worried about the day, dumping your things on your staff, or dumping your real dramas on your first three patients because you have had a bad morning.  You see the standard means you set it high for yourself and then your staff.  You have that rigorous standard that our personal issues, while a part of us, don’t define us when we are in our offices. 

Ruthless means I am just a jerk.  Ruthless would mean just do whatever I say to do. Here is the material, train yourself and if you’re not doing it, you’re out of here.  Ruthless would be not really giving a tech an expectation and then firing them because they didn’t know that expectation.  Ruthless is just not being nice.  We are saying rigorous it is very solid.  Sometimes it feels a little cold but it is very important that someone sets this up. 

That the way you treat your staff, the way you lead your staff is the way you are leading your patients.  You are, as the clinician in an authority role with the patient, rigorous with those standards.  In other words, “Hey, if you miss appointments I can’t help you.” You can be ruthless which means, “If you miss another appointment I am going to make you watch four videos,” or, in old school practices, they charge the patient for missed appointments.  A great way to build goodwill in the community.  Not. 

And then there’s the retiring kind of boss which is, “Everything is fine, it’s that loose abdication of authority and just sort of go with the flow and say, “She or he is a good person.”  So the bosses’ style is important.